


it'll last longer

by hoosierbitch



Category: White Collar
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Community: kink_bingo, F/M, Grief, Photography
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-12
Updated: 2010-07-12
Packaged: 2017-10-10 12:46:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/99933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoosierbitch/pseuds/hoosierbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three months after Kate dies Neal finds a box of photographs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it'll last longer

Three months after Kate dies Neal finds a box of photographs. A moldy cardboard box in a nearly-uncrackable safe in a warehouse that isn’t supposed to exist. He’d never been inspired to paint his own work. Never wanted to pick up a brush or a chisel and say: this is how I see the world. Not until Kate. And Kate, he had wanted to remember _exactly_. So he’d bought a camera.

There are three years of photos in the box, all mixed together and out-of-order. One from the picnic she’d put together for their second anniversary – it’s just a close-up of her hand. Fingernails digging into the dirt, blades of grass between her fingers. Then a picture of her in a pair of sweats and one of his undershirts, the week they’d both come down with the flu. A strip from a photo booth on their fourth date; three funny faces and the fourth – he runs a careful fingertip over the smooth surface. The picture had been taken right before they kissed. A snapshot of preparation. His hand brushing back her hair, her face in profile, his forehead wrinkled with concentration, a shy smile on her lips.

The only photos that are sorted are the ones tucked into a yellowing envelope. “What if our kids find these someday?” she’d asked, leafing through a pile of close-ups of her nipples. _Our kids,_ he’d thought, and pulled her back into bed.

He’d spent an entire month taking pictures of her feet. In heels and slippers and toe socks, with half-painted nails, against the white backdrop of their sheets, after a long day with lint between her toes and marks from the elastic around her ankles. A month of running his hand over the arch of her foot to position it just so, of trying to time the click of the camera with the apex of her orgasm because he’d loved the way her toes curled.

They’re all black and white. And after he finds the box, after he looks through every single picture inside of it – he starts to remember her that way. In black and white. Frozen in place, like a doll, like a mannequin. It’s still better than what he’d had before. _The memory of her face blurred through the airplane window. Fowler’s hand on her shoulder._

There’s years of loving Kate, in that box. Loving her body and face and smile, loving the clothes she’d worn and the things she’d done. None of it’s sorted out or organized because he hadn’t been finished yet. He’d never gotten the picture he wanted of the dimples in her elbows, or of her hair blowing in the wind on the pier, or a shot of just her lips – there’s only three years of loving Kate in that box. An incomplete work of art, an unfinished study, a dead woman.

He remembers her now in black and white. Frozen, like a statue, lint between her toes and a tentative smile on her lips.


End file.
